Freedom Fighters - The one when a plumber defends America from the Russians

To this day, exactly sixteen years ago, the Hitman creators threw out a game in which the US defended itself as a plumber from the Soviet invasion.

The most famous plumber in the video game world is (Super) Mario. But he no longer practices or likes the profession of calling himself a plumber, so we always highlight that interest when we think of Freedom Fighters. In that title, which came out today 16 years ago, we defended New York from the Russians as Cristopher Stone, once a plumber, and under the force of an opportunity leader of resistance against the Soviet occupation.

Freedom Fighters was a project of Danish IO Interactive, a team known for its Hitman series of games. It was their first attempt at the action genre of games, and they had a strong partner in that endeavor, as he jumped into Electronic Arts as a game publisher. At first, the game was supposed to be a turn-based strategy game called Freedom: The Battle for Liberty Island, but from the original idea, a third-person shooter developed with team management elements with up to 12 fighters.

The teammates were instrumental in fighting the Russians who were like ... Russians? Basically, there were many, so we ordered the fellow soldiers to attack or defend certain points on the map. We unlocked additional space for the castors by solving optional tasks.


The game came out on consoles of the time (PS2, Xbox, GameCube) and on PC, and although it picked up good ratings, sales were not great. The game was criticized for its short duration of only a few hours, but was remembered for its excellent music composed by Jesper Kyd in collaboration with the Hungarian Radio Choir.

The Freedom Fighters never got a remaster or a sequel, but in 2017 IO Interactive bought Square Enix rights to that franchise along with Hitman, so the franchise has some future - at least for now. That they did not forget her was proved last year in Hitman 2, where materials from Freedom Fighters were shot on an arcade machine. Admittedly, it's not very likely that the Freedom Fighters will be back so soon since the Danes are now working on Hitman 3 and an original project.